Australian Politics
Green attacks on horse racing
This is reminscent of an attempted ban on dog racing at Wentworth Park in 2016. As dog racing is mainly working-class that ban was very badly received and had to be rapidly reversed. It ruined the image of then NSW premier Mike Baird, however, and led to him being tossed out. I hope the present NSW government learns from the precedent
It is not trendy to vote for the Greens. It is irresponsible and downright stupid to vote for a party that will send the country broke as it chases fanciful greenhouse emissions targets. They are a cancer on the Australian political landscape.
Any leader of a political party who is ashamed of the Australian flag should be deported. Yet it is other divisive and harebrained policies that will destroy the fabric of Australian life.
Let’s use the example of the Greens’ obsession with closing down the racing industries on animal welfare grounds and responsible gambling propaganda.
Last week, the South Australian government supported the Greens to outlaw jumps racing, effectively killing off the annual Oakbank festival each Easter. There are now plans by the Greens to outlaw the whip in thoroughbred racing. The ultimate aim is to ban racing altogether.
You even had NSW Thoroughbreds boss Peter V’landys sticking the knife in when the decision was made, despite the fact banning horse racing was next on the Greens’ agenda.
The number of people who participate or are employed or volunteer in horseracing is estimated at between 150,000 and 200,000. At least 4.5 million people attend a race meeting each year, about a million people have a regular bet and more than 87,000 have an interest in owning a racehorse. Thoroughbred, harness and greyhound racing are in many smaller towns the glue that keeps the community together.
The racing industry pays more than $1bn in state and federal taxes. In recent years, the racing industry has devoted a share of race takings to animal welfare programs.
All of this is lost on fanatical Greens politicians.
If you like a flutter and you voted for the Greens at the last election, please rethink your values and priorities.
The Greens have a radical agenda that will change Australia irrevocably if they ever gained power.
They must be stopped.
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Problems with the Greens real agenda
When almost two million Australians voted Green on May 21, how many in this huge 1.3 million surge in Green support over the past two decades really knew what they were voting for? Saving the planet was only the tip of the Green policy iceberg. Voters, genuinely believing in the urgent need for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, (many of them comfortably-off, high-polluting virtue-signallers), were effectively granting 12 Green senators what could be wide-ranging political power over an elected Labor government’s legislation. Their active, and very controversial, agenda is far wider than climate and may well cause the government difficult trade-off problems. This is on top of the uncertain implications of a climate policy that seeks ‘urgently to phase out all fossil fuels for export and domestic use’, with an anti-expansion commitment even during the necessary transition stage to renewable energy, both locally and for exports.
The first signs of trouble on this front appeared in last month’s offensive stunt by Green’s leader Adam Bandt refusing to stand with an Australian flag because it ‘represented dispossession to First Nations people’ and would be replaced when Australia became a republic. Then there has been widespread public criticism of the Green’s pacifist view that China poses no threat and defence spending should be slashed. This was followed by what the Australian’s Paul Kelly described last weekend as ‘Greens drunk on hubris’ after their May election successes, in threatening to use their near-balance-of-power in the Senate to defeat the new government’s proposed Climate Bill on the grounds that its tougher emissions reduction target is not tough enough – a reprise of their much-criticised destruction of the Rudd government’s 2009 proposals.
The hubris arising from this newly acquired parliamentary relevance will inevitably lead to the enthusiastic promotion of pet political projects, few of them with popular support, that litter the thousands of words of the Green policy manifesto. So prepare for a dose of reality that will confirm the truth in the old saw about the watermelon Greens – green on the outside but solid red inside.
Behind the blandly stated four key principles: ‘ecological sustainability, grassroots democracy, social justice, and peace and non-violence’, lies a mixture of authoritarian social policies, nationalising significant sections of the economy, promises of unfunded volumes of public largesse that they would never face the prospect of having to deliver, destruction of Australia’s US alliance, savage cuts to defence, cuddling up to a China that ‘poses no threat to Australia’, massive tax hikes, an end to negative gearing, votes for 16-year-olds, the end of subsidising private health insurance, legalising the production, sale and use of recreational cannabis, decriminalising the personal use, possession and non-commercial sale of drugs, breaking up the concentrated ownership of large media organisations through government regulation and, in a nod to its election funding source, the CFMEU, making it easier to go on strike.
With an eye at the under-25 demographic which provides the Greens with much of their voting support, there is a cornucopia of goodies including a guaranteed adequate and secure income allowance for young people to enable full participation in education and training opportunities, abolishing student debt, providing affordable, accessible and secure housing options for young people, gig workers to be recognised as employees or a new category of autonomous worker and be extended rights, protections and entitlements that are not less than those granted to employees, and the extension of the vote to 16 and 17-year-olds (to give them the opportunity to provide an electoral ‘thank you?’).
All these will all be paraded along with other woke fads (like being able to self-identify gender, and for trans-women to compete in competitive sport against biological women) many of which may horrify the one in five constituents of Melbourne’s classy Kooyong and Sydney’s posh Wentworth who voted Green in the Senate after tossing out their Liberal MPs for a Teal ‘independent’ in the House of Representatives. Will they, as they shop at ritzy Double Bay, obediently ‘Reduce the overproduction and overconsumption of consumer goods that both depend upon fossil fuels and put unnecessary pressure on environmental resources’? What is their response to Green concerns that population growth is ‘outstripping our environmental capacity’, but that we nevertheless must end Australia’s successful sovereign borders approach to asylum seekers by the ‘elimination of mandatory and indefinite detention,and the abolition of offshore processing’.
The 13 million or 87 per cent of Australian voters, who did not vote Green now have to put up with the consequential bellicose minority of 12 Green senators in a chamber of 76 dictating to the Labor government what legislation it will allow to become law. It was only two decades ago, during John Howard’s government, that the Greens could only attract fewer than five per cent of voters. But these 569,000, centred in inner metropolitan areas, particularly in Victoria, have grown unnervingly by 230 per cent, even storming the Coalition citadel of Queensland, snaffling more than 12 per cent of the Queensland vote following an incredible five-times jump from 2001’s 71,000 to 373,460 supporters. The Coalition’s former stronghold of WA also opened the door, with Green support multiplying from 65,000 to 217,571. And South Australia has gone from nothing to 135,000. The reward has been two Senate seats from each state for a party that is clearly on the march.
Whether the Greens (and Teals) maintain their remarkable momentum will depend not only on geo-political events over the next three years, but also on our schools and universities maintaining their climate catastrophe mantra, and influencing the younger Green-voting cohort. It is striking that apart from inner-city seats like Perth, Fremantle and Sydney, whose Green vote is well over 20 per cent, coal and heavy engineering cities like Wollongong and Newcastle, which have the most to lose from the economic consequences of Green policies, also have some of the largest percentages of Green supporters. But as a cynic pointed out to me, both are university towns. QED
https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/business-robbery-etc-97
************************************************Heat is on in the clash of energy and environment
As the Albanese government prepares to face its first test in parliament to lift the nation’s ambition on climate change, global action is fracturing in the face of soaring costs. The politics of energy and climate are being pulled in opposite directions.
A rush back to coal is being encouraged in Europe. But, on cue, soaring temperatures across parts of North America and Britain have fuelled a frenzy of “weather porn” in which temperature extremes are presented as the new normal in a warming world.
Extreme weather is a key feature of Australia’s five-yearly State of the Environment report that was released this week by Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to shame the Coalition and add urgency to debate. The report recommends a return to the earthy wisdom of Indigenous Australians.
Across the board, the intensity of hyperbole both on climate and nature stands in inverse proportion to the potency of action. Sweeping promises made by US President Joe Biden for green spending programs and cuts to fossil fuel use have been dashed by political reality.
The US Supreme Court has blocked attempts by the Environmental Protection Agency to proactively curb fossil fuel emissions. Having demonised the shale industry that briefly delivered energy independence to the US, Biden has been in Saudi Arabia asking the kingdom to produce more oil to ease the fuel price pressure at the pump for voters back home.
At least 13 people died in Britain during a spell of record-breaking hot weather that triggered warnings that efforts…
Rather than the hundreds of billions of dollars sought from congress for spending on green initiatives, Biden has been left with angry words and token executive orders that deliver fresh subsidies to offshore wind. With inflation rising, attention is now firmly focused on the rising cost of living.
Europe has been told by the International Energy Agency to quickly burn more coal to preserve supplies of gas. Rising prices, exacerbated by Russia’s war in Ukraine, are stirring political unrest, notably in The Netherlands, which leaders warn could worsen if fuel supplies remain constrained.
In Britain, the two candidates vying to replace Boris Johnson as prime minister, Rishi Sunak and former foreign minister Liz Truss, have been criticised by activists for having weak records on climate change action. But only 4 per cent of Conservative Party members surveyed in a poll said that hitting the target of net-zero emissions by 2050 should be one of the top three priorities for the next Tory leader.
Meanwhile China, the world’s biggest emissions nation, is continuing to double down on coal. In a speech last month, Chinese Vice-Premier Han Zheng stressed the need to promote the “clean and efficient use of coal”, adding coal should be a “ballast stone” in stabilising the macro-economy and consumer prices and ensuring people’s wellbeing.
China’s biggest coal-producing province, Shanxi, intends to increase its output by 107 million tonnes this year to 1.3 billion tonnes of coal. In 2023, coal production from the region will increase further to 1.35 billion tonnes. Shanxi accounts for about one-quarter of China’s total coal production. But China also imports about 320 million tonnes of coal, increasingly from Indonesia.
The conundrum for leaders is that success in delivering climate change policies has become a defining measure for environmental performance. As Brendan O’Neill observed in The Spectator in Britain, the “unhinged eco-dread over the heatwave (in Britain) exposes how millenarian environmentalism has become”. Millennialism is the belief that the end of this world is at hand and that in its wake will appear a New World, inexhaustibly fertile, harmonious, sanctified and just.
The answer for some is a return to the wisdom of Indigenous communities, who have a deeper understanding of the ways of nature. Australia’s State of the Environment report says Indigenous knowledge and sustainable cultural practice are key to environmental management. It says: “Indigenous peoples’ stewardship of Country is a deep connection, passed down through the generations and developed over tens of thousands of years.
“It involves songlines, totems, cultural principles, knowledge of the animals and plants, and land and sea management practices.
“Indigenous knowledge of Country and management practices provide a valuable approach for caring for the environment for all Australians.
“As Indigenous peoples’ lands and seas are returned to their care, so are cultural management practices. This has had good results. Indigenous Australians are the first scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians (STEM), and many respectful and reciprocal collaborations with other scientists are shaping a pathway for our nation’s future.”
This has led the Australian Environment Foundation to condemn the report as “unprofessional claptrap”. AEF chairman Tom Bostock says the report is loaded with assumptions and lacking in scientific rigour. “The material in the report is symptomatic of an extreme green-left, anti-wealth producing ideology that pervades environmental agencies throughout Australia. Among the disturbing impacts of this is the spreading of alarmism to susceptible Australian minds,” he says.
The challenge for politicians is to direct the groundswell of support for action on climate to the practical issues of better land management. This includes harnessing the willingness of companies to invest both in nature and Indigenous welfare to demonstrate their good corporate intentions.
Overall, the State of the Environment report finds that all aspects of the Australian environment are under pressure, and many are declining.
“Although there have been numerous environmental initiatives at both national and state and territory levels, there is insufficient overall investment and lack of co-ordination to be able to adequately address the growing impacts from climate change, land clearing, invasive species, pollution and urban expansion,” the report says.
Report co-lead author Kristen Williams, from the CSIRO, says intense competition for land resources has resulted in continued declines in the amount and condition of our land-based natural capital. Many parts of Australia are highly degraded and native vegetation has been extensively cleared.
“The widespread reduction in the capacity of native vegetation to support Australia’s unique biodiversity is exacerbated by declining habitat quality, climate change and the prevalence of invasive species. It can take many decades for ecosystems to fully recover,” she says.
Helen Murphy, also from the CSIRO, says the pressures facing Australian biodiversity have not improved since the 2016 State of the Environment report, and outcomes for species and ecosystems are generally poor.
“Our inability to adequately manage pressures will continue to result in species extinctions and deteriorating ecosystem conditions unless current management approaches and investments are substantially improved,” Murphy says.
Environment groups mostly have welcomed the findings of the report, which they say is a damning indictment of the Morrison government. But former Greens leader Bob Brown has provided a blistering critique that damns all sides.
“This is not a failure of the last decade of government. It is a failure of the last century of government,” Brown says, highlighting the Keating government’s cave-in to a logging truck blockade in 1995, John Howard’s Regional Forest Agreements, and the failure of governments to give Aboriginal people a veto over mining and other destructive incursions on their land.
While climate change is claimed as a central part of the nation’s environmental problems, the answer will not be found in whatever targets the Albanese government is able to get through parliament.
Greenpeace is calling for “urgent and decisive emissions reduction, an end to new fossil fuel extraction, and rapid acceleration of the shift to cleaner, cheaper renewable energy”.
The WWF has set a blueprint that calls for strengthened nature laws with strong national standards overseen by an independent and well-resourced national Environmental Protection Agency. The blueprint mirrors a prescription presented to government by former competition tsar Graeme Samuel in his review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act.
Plibersek has said she will respond to Samuel’s recommendations this year. The government will then aim to develop new environmental legislation next year.
In the meantime, Plibersek says there will be an immediate start on improving environmental data and regional planning – establishing a shared view around what needs to be protected or restored, and areas where development can occur with minimal consequence.
Ultimately, the issues are economic as much as environmental and can be achieved only with broad agreement across all levels of government and business. Plibersek says ambition is important “but it’s not much good without achievement”.
This is the lesson that applies both to climate policy and caring for the natural world.
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ABC is more interested in silencing alternative views
For a media behemoth that regularly assails its targets (fairly and unfairly) with gusto and aggression, the ABC is awfully sensitive to criticism.
It should not be. The national broadcaster should expect every taxpayer to have a view about its operations, and should aim to be part of public debate, for good or for ill, every single day.
This is the ABC’s raison d’etre. If there are high expectations for the organisation they are warranted by the lofty ambitions of the charter and more than a billion dollars a year in taxpayer funding – and given its staff are on the public payroll they should be acutely aware of a natural tendency towards the collectivist side of politics.
Yet Aunty lashes out at critics (in response to my 2013 suggestion its budget should be trimmed, it portrayed me up a dog) and runs from scrutiny. After 90 years at the centre of the nation’s cultural and political life, the ABC still seems uncertain about its role.
The Sky News Australia special investigation ‘Your ABC Exposed’ examines one of the country’s most important… cultural institutions and whether the taxpayer-funded service unites or divides Australians. As one of the country’s most revered and important cultural institutions marks its 90th anniversary, Sky News will explore the Australian More
For the past few months, I have been working on a Sky News documentary to mark the public broadcaster’s 90th anniversary and ask whether it is fit for purpose. Despite multiple requests for interviews to ABC chair Ita Buttrose, managing director David Anderson, other directors, senior managers, and on-air presenters, past and present, we managed only one acceptance.
Former 7.30 Report host and staff-elected board member Quentin Dempster engaged in the project. Dempster has debated media issues with me previously on Sky News and there is little we agree on (he belongs to the Twitter school of News Corp media conspiracists) but I respect him for his willingness to sit down and engage in civil debate.
That mature approach contrasts with former ABC Melbourne radio host Jon Faine who responded to our request for an interview by penning a rant in The Age against Sky News Australia, Sky News UK, Fox News, Nigel Farage, the “Brexit calamity” and Donald Trump. Although, as far as I can recall, Faine and I have never spoken, he had firm views about me as an “avowed sledger” of the ABC.
Faine declared that his “animus” towards me stemmed from the fact that apart from hosting television on Sky, I had previously worked for Liberal politicians Alexander Downer and Malcolm Turnbull, wrote for this newspaper, and “consistently expressed resolute hostility” towards the ABC. He said I could not present a balanced view of the national broadcaster (I think he meant uncritical).
Many decades behind an ABC microphone and Faine still could not grasp the concept of embracing a diversity of views and encouraging robust discussion. Instead of rising to the challenge to defend or promote his beloved ABC, he preferred snide potshots from entrenched positions.
Oh well, we tried. But you have got to wonder about the unwillingness to engage in debate – for the documentary I resorted to doorstopping Anderson on his way out of an ABC charity event.
This points to a deeply troubling polarisation of public debate, where rather than seeing a contest of ideas in the public square we are seeing different views contained within discrete, self-affirming echo-chambers. It is the Americanisation and Twitterfication of debate, and it should be resisted.
The ABC is best placed to counter this trend. Its charter demands a reflection of “cultural diversity” as well as delivering “objectivity” and “impartiality” yet it constantly fields stacked panels and programs as if the overwhelming majority of the populace subscribes to a green left worldview. Topics that are most deserving of analysis and interrogation – such as climate change, energy options, immigration, the Indigenous voice to parliament, and our pandemic response – too often play out in monochrome on the national broadcaster. On these issues and more, instead of spirited debate there seems to be a corporate view and a relentless chorus of agreement among its staff.
The ABC seeks to win arguments not on their merits but by silencing alternative views. It is little wonder then that the ABC and its presenters lack the ability to discuss and defend their own behaviour.
This must say something about the depth of their conviction. It is almost impossible to carry an argument publicly if you do not believe it.
Who at the ABC could seriously contend it does not exhibit an ideological bias towards the green left (even a board member, Joseph Gersh, has admitted the national broadcaster’s “vibe” is “more left than right” and that it should have more conservative voices), or that it has not engaged in erroneous vigilante journalism against mainly conservative targets such as Cardinal George Pell, Christian Porter, Alan Tudge, and Scott Morrison?
But if the ABC is not objective, and does not reflect the diversity of views across the country, then it is failing to adhere to its charter – that is, the law, under the ABC Act. The board, management, and the responsible government minister (now Michelle Rowland) should not stand for this.
As former board member Janet Albrechtsen says in my documentary, the answer is quite simple. “It has got a charter,” Albrechtsen explains, “all it needs to do is abide by that charter and it would produce terrific content.”
Not only would a diversity of views ensure the ABC abides by the law and delivers on fairness and pluralism, it would also make it much more entertaining and compelling. Yet too often this does not happen; on the rare occasions ABC presenters have right-of-centre commentators on their programs they feel the need to explain themselves to the Twitter mob.
If the ABC was more pluralistic and representative, it would have broader support across the population and political spectrum, and would more easily defend itself in public debate. By living in denial and failing to act, it condemns itself to a defensive posture.
It should be unthinkable that a prime minister would want to avoid appearing on the national broadcaster the way Morrison did during the last election campaign. But the fault lies with the ABC – it should be an unbiased and indispensable platform for national political debate.
That role cannot be fulfilled when its chief political reporter Andrew Probyn describes Tony Abbott (in a news report, mind you) as the “most destructive” politician in a generation, or its chief current affairs political reporter Laura Tingle uses social media to gratuitously accuse Morrison of “ideological bastardry”. It is laughable that such obvious transgressions go unremedied, and the ABC and its supporters accuse the conservative politicians of bloody-mindedness rather than vice versa.
In the interests of fairness, and on behalf of at least half of the population who do not wish to fund a green left broadcaster, this needs to be fixed. We seem to have reached a stage in this country where ideology is more prevalent in our publicly funded media than it is in our politics.
In 1932 the establishment of the ABC was an inspirational reform, embracing the relatively new technology of radio to bind together a disparate population spread thinly across a vast continent. The Australian Broadcasting Commission, as it was then called, was our only national media organisation.
If the national broadcaster did not exist today there would be no imperative to create it because we have instant and unprecedented access to local, national and global information and communication services. The ABC’s response to this new media landscape has been to expand into every digital niche, trying to pump its content into all available markets and in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
Not only does this strategy potentially crowd out commercial media – large, small, existing, and prospective – but it stretches the ABC’s resources and ambition.
The organisation would do better to focus on doing what others cannot.
And that should bring it back to the ABC Act and key words such as accurate, impartial, objective, balance and diversity. If the national broadcaster were to deliver on these, it could redefine itself as a central arena for the contest of ideas.
In an increasingly polarised media space, the ABC is making a grave error by drifting to one pole. It could be the place – should be the place – for the crosspollination of views and arguments.
With digital giants, media silos and endless algorithms conspiring to feed people only what they already know or like, a genuinely diverse and rational public square is likely to become increasingly rare and even more sorely needed. If the ABC were committed to such a role, it would guarantee itself a fruitful role for another 90 years.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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